


Oh Darling

by mittamoo



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Angst, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other, character injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 16:02:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17144795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mittamoo/pseuds/mittamoo
Summary: “Oh darling,” she murmurs to the uncomprehending bundle nestled in her arms, not regretful, not quite, “what have I done to you?”





	Oh Darling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [charmedopal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/charmedopal/gifts).



> so the least festive secret santa for kayla! who now ss is over needs to sleep with one eye open

In a Baltimore hospital bed lays a woman. Filthy, sweaty, and exhausted she rests before a once wailing baby is thrust into her arms. The thing is soft in every sense of the word. It has her mouth, and the same shape of her brow. She focuses on these things so she doesn’t have to think about the upturn of its nose, or the sharp blue of its eyes. She focuses on the thing’s bald head and not the possibility it will grow in auburn, allows herself a moment to wonder if she is capable of loving something that resembles the man stood outside her door so closely. She shakes the thought away and glances down to the thing in her arms, sticky and new, seeking comfort in her warmth. Later she will dread and hope in equal measure that it will be every bit as brutal as its father, there is no room for a gentle soul in the world it will inhabit. But for now she thinks of the man she isn’t sure how to stop loving, stood outside in the hall. Thinks of the smile of a new father instead of a butcher that adorned his face before stepping out. Strokes her finger down the cheek of this tiny thing.

“Oh darling,” she murmurs to the uncomprehending bundle nestled in her arms, not regretful, not quite, “what have I done to you?”

Years later she sits in the passenger seat of a car, dying from a wound inflicted by the man she once loved, and watches. The tiny thing in her arms has grown into a boy- almost a man. Though privately she admits with a hint of sorrow that he was never a child. With her mouth and the shape of her brow. Eyes and hair covered. For the sake of staying hidden and for the sake of making her son look like anyone but _him_. She’d shaken off the thought of not loving him within moments but as the red grew in she soon found it easier to love him under the cover of contacts and dye. He sits with a white knuckled grip on the steering wheel and a loaded gun resting in his lap. His face a hard, blank mask even as she watches the slow bloom of blood that is seeping through his own shirt. _He_ is hard and blank she thinks through necessity not nature, memories of wide eyes and kind hands crushed under relentless correction of both the butcher and her. And far, so far from that hospital bed in Baltimore she looks at the thing she made as she slowly dies and knows that he fears her nearly as much as he fears the thing she strove to protect him from. Her last words are not apologies for she is not sorry, she forces promises from his lips. In her last breath she allows herself a moment of weakness.

_Oh darling,_ she thinks, _what have I done to you?_

*****

The Wesninski house is simultaneously far worse and eerily more normal than she ever could have anticipated. Despite herself, a small part of her had thought the house would be seeped top to bottom in fresh and drying blood alike despite what years of experience have taught her. Like many of the homes of the monsters on this earth the home they live in is clean, normal. Nice, even. It is a regular, if not a bit lavish upper-class home.

Another thing she had not anticipated despite knowing better was the child. Silent, quick and small, so small he roams through the halls in a manner a spiting image of the butcher himself. For as long as she has been there she is unable to think of a time the little boy has spoken or made a sound beyond his faint footsteps as he dodges the adults of the home. She can’t help but think of her own son at home, around the same age as the tiny spectre of the Wesninski house. She thinks of her own little boy who is messy, and vibrant and alive, and the comparison makes her hurt for the blank- faced child before her.

The first time she hears Nathaniel make a sound is also the very first time she sees him not entirely alone, it is also the first time she sees more than a glimpse of Mary Wesninski since she’d begun her undercover work as a cook, then eventually general errand girl, in the house. Mary, despite her extravagant clothing is a plain, tight-lipped woman with a too harsh grip hold on her son’s thin wrist. Nathaniel, instead of his placid quiet he is wailing, tears and snot trailing in lines down his face. Part of her feels much more at ease at the sight, she knows how to deal with crying children. _This is normal._ But before she can step forward, Mary acts first with a sharp shake as she hisses for quiet and for a moment he quiets. It does not last. This time Mary pulls him into her arms and clamps a hand over the tiny child’s mouth and pinches his nose shut. Nathaniel turns purple under his mother’s unrelenting grip and for a long moment she wonder if she will watch the boy die today until Mary releases her grip and walks briskly away from the, now silent heap that is her son. The first time she ever hears Nathaniel make a sound is also the first time she gathers the child into her arms.

In the months that go by things seem to go almost blandly after that point, she continues to work in the kitchens and gather evidence against the Wesninski circle. There is only one addition to that routine, and that comes in the form of Nathaniel who she places softly on the counter as she works around him. She listens to the little boy babble to her about his interests, about playing little league exy. Over time she starts to think of Nathaniel less as the unnerving ghost that wanders the halls but instead of the little boy who gives her shy smiles and tries to sneak bits of fruit from behind her back. She can’t help but think of Nathaniel meeting her own son, of becoming a foster parent. Of stepping forward and adopting Nathaniel as her own son. It becomes an image in her head that is so close that she can almost taste. All she has to do, she thinks, is finish this. And then she gets caught.

As she lay in the basement, the one she had never found in all her time in the house, she looks around at the people who stand around her, The Butcher himself brandishing a blunted axe above her. Lola stands before her too, grinning and cruel, a handing reaching down to grasp something- someone. Finally she looks to where he stands- Nathaniel, his blanked face framed by sharp nails holding his face towards her. Forcing him to watch. In the long painful hours that follow she grieves for the son waiting for her at home that will be left without a mother, the son she will never see again. She grieves for the silent ghost of a boy in the corner of that bloody basement. She grieves for the little boy she failed to save.

*****

Miles and years away, huddled alone in an abandoned Arizona house, in a moment of weakness Neil Josten lights a candle. Not only for the life of his mother but for the life of the kind cook he no longer remembers the name of.

*****

The pain in his abdomen burns bright as he twists and weaves through late night crowds and into abandoned alleys and backstreets, a hand pressed firmly against the wound sliced into his gut. The man who carved him open dead but Jacques needs to keep moving, there’s no telling who else could be looking for him still. The blood is sticky beneath his hands and doesn’t seem to be slowing at all, the wound feels deep as he prods at it with shaking fingers. He can’t stop and look at the gash properly until he’s found his mom again.

Pulling himself over the wall he can feed his flesh being stretched too far and the familiar feeling of tearing flesh. He presses his hand against the wound firmer and firmer. Slipping back into the crowd is easy, he bites his tongue and forces himself to even out his walk. Don’t draw attention. He is fine, he is alive and he can still move, the immediate threat is dealt with. He. Is. Fine.  

The place his needs to wait is an inconspicuous shop corner on a populated street, a place easy to melt into the crowd should he become unsafe once more. He waits there for his mother and watches the people pass, jealous of their freedom and weary of their intentions. Still he sits and watches out for his mother or any of his father’s men, a hand gripped tight to his gut as sticky wetness oozes out from between his fingers.

When she arrives to get him, his mom walks with a well concealed limp over the shop front he is sat at and hauls him to his feet with a tight arm slung over his shoulder. Like that they walk for a long time in a long looping route too difficult to properly track. Each step sending jolts of searing flame into his abdomen consuming him. The feeling too much and numbing all at the same time. He is light headed from blood loss but his steps do not falter- cannot falter. They keep moving forward until it is certain they are alone.

Then, and only then does she turn to scrutinize him hands as gentle as they ever are as she turns him this way and that, inspecting his face and finally her eyes coming to rest at where his hands grip his gut under his shirt.

“ _Jacques are you alright?”_ a question that is not a question.

He tells her “ _I’m fine_ ” he eyes narrow. She strikes him. Once. Twice “ _I’m fine_ ” he tells her, stronger this time.

Seemingly satisfied for now, her eyes trail back to his gut as she reaches out to pull up his ruined shirt. She takes a moment to assess the blood covering him before she almost gingerly starts to pull his hands away too, only it isn’t just his hands that come away from the wound something else seems to come with his hands. It is only when his mom hurriedly shoves his hands back to where they were and bundles him into the car that he realised what had happened. Blood rushes in his ears as his mother speeds away, dialling a number on their burner phone as they go. He knows she is speaking, can see her mouth moving rapidly, face pale and knuckles bloodless stretched over the steering wheel. Distantly he can’t help but think that driving like this is incredibly unsafe.

A destination seemingly in mind they drive. His head lolls against the car window as the gravity of the situation hits him. That the only thing keeping his intestines inside of his body is his own hands. Distantly the whole situation reminds him of when he was little and skinned his knee, it hadn’t hurt until he’d seen what he’d done. Only this time he just didn’t care about the wound until he’d seen what he’s done.

They pull up to a vet’s surgery, closed and locked for the night. His mom opens the car doors and pushes him stumbling towards the building where they are urged inside by a man that he does not know. The man is short haired, and clean-shaven, but he does not speak as he pushes them onwards to another room with plastic sheeting laid out all around. The situation seems even more urgent as his mom lifts him in her arms briefly to lay him on the exam bench. Even as small as he is his legs sprawl uncomfortably over the edge. It is this he focuses on as the unnamed man bundles around the room, washing his hands and pulling on gloves. It is the most effort to sterilisation that any of his wounds have ever received.

Hands washed his mother’s contact approaches the exam table with a syringe of something. _Ketamine_ he supplies at a hissed question from his mother. She lets it be injected into the crook of his elbow and then they wait. First the pain lessens from a near all-consuming fire to a dulled ache, then finally to nothing at all. As the pain goes as does most of the grip he has with his surroundings. The only thing he has left to cling to is roiling nausea as he gags and heaves bile down his mother’s front. Her hands are in his hair, running through it with little gentleness. He wonders if she is pulling his hair out. He wonders if he will die here.

His mom leans in close to him, shaking with an anger borne from desperation. And she whispers to him, full of conviction.

“This, Abram, Is not how you die.”

*****

 As the dust begins to settle around them he stands, a man forged in fire and blood. Forged in iron and harsh unforgiving hands, and he has emerged the other side, not stronger for it. He does not crawl from the ashes of his pain stronger for the senseless suffering, but none the less he emerges alive. His father is dead, his mother is dead, and in a sense, he thinks that he has died too. And in the ruin of the aftermath he stands Neil Abram Josten, a man created anew. He stands and basks in the warmth of those that surround him and thinks quietly to himself that there is a strength to be found in unreserved kindness. Undeniable power to be found in looking at the cycle of hurt and choosing mercy instead. And he is not soft, or kind, or merciful, but Neil Abram Josten has time now and he thinks that he’d like to learn how to be.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! please tell me what you thought!


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